It’s Sunday. I just wrote six pages of the current RP story I’m working on and feeling a little brain dead now. I was scrolling through my folder of screen shots, looking for images that I can use on posts that I have planned for this week, and came across an image that I made for an RP event for my guild. I’ve always really liked it. I thought it would be fun to use Sundays to post weird little memories of this game, since I missed blogging about them as they happened. Going into the vault, if you will.
My guild has a long history of RP. It was one of the original RP guilds on Argent Dawn, with a focus on troll RP specifically. Back in those days, I’m told they would do epic troll marches through Orgrimmar, STV, and to the dancing troll village in Darkshore. During BC, my guild expanded into a five guild family, divided by race. The troll tradition stayed strong, and there was an interesting bit of drama between them and the newly joined Blood Elves. During Wrath, the guild changed again, and all five of the guilds were brought under a single guild tag, both systematically and metaphorically as well. This is when I became a member of the guild. Cataclysm brought a change in leadership and a new guild tag, but the foundation of the guild remained the same.
While we’re an RP guild at heart, we do a lot more than that now, and raiding tends to dominate guild activities. But we still care about lore and we still like doing RP events, though we’ve been woefully bad about such things as of late. I’m hoping that Mists will bring back a return to interest in RP. I know that I personally found Cataclysm’s story difficult to RP around, and the idea of exploring all new worlds is incredibly appealing to me.
Despite the lack of structured RP, we did do an event last year that was definitely a nod back to the foundation of the guild. All of us got onto our troll toons and met in the troll section of Orgrimmar. After a quick scene, we walked through the city and out into Durotar, eventually ending at the Echo Isles. It was my dear friend Bim’s idea to do this event, and we decided to get people interested in doing troll RP (our guild tends to looooove blood elf stuff and not much else) we would make up a neat graphic for it, almost like a movie release. Since I’m the resident graphic designer for my guild, I got to have a lot of fun making up the invite for this one.
I have to admit that when I get to design stuff for WoW, I really enjoy taking a break from the rules that consitute good design. I get to use weird display fonts and all sorts of layers and filters that I wouldn’t touch in for professional work. It’s a bit like blogging in that way that I can kind of just let my mind do whatever and not worry about what I’m supposed to do. This invite was so much fun because I got to do lots of that sort of thing!
It started with the screen shot, which I thought was really beautiful. I usually play with my graphics set to remedial since I have an aging computer that tends to freak out when I ask it to do anything too complicated. So it’s always fun for me too see how beautiful the landscapes in WoW really are. I tend to forget about that with everything set on low all the time.
Pretty as the image was, it just didn’t feel like it was enough, so I added some decay to it, layering over a decomposed graphic that I use for a lot of things, including the background and header for this blog. That still didn’t feel like quite enough though, so I started researching more textures that I could add in. I started looking for artwork that would fit the trolls islander flare, then looked at Mayan and Aztec designs as well. None of that seemed to fit. After a bit more searching, I found some Maori graphics that I thought would suit my purposes perfectly, and layered them onto the landscape. The result is shown above, and to this day it’s something that I still think is pretty cool.
Here’s hoping that Mists will bring new fun opportunities for RP and good excuses for me to make event invites like this again!
The Dancing Tree 